google+ circles: bull’s eye or child’s play?

Google launched testing of google+ last week. One interesting feature is the concept of circles: sorting your friends into friends, family, acquaintances and cool-people-to-follow. The interface for sorting friends is OK, and I may add my own circles.

The idea of using circles got me thinking about overlaps and how the circles could overlap. Most of the right’s management we are using today always starts out with a well defined root and hierarchical structure under the root. I believe we need circles of rights, not hierarchies. I say this having worked both in the enterprise environment, social networks and for cross-organizational solutions. Bull’s eye is composed of concentric circles, exemplified by True friends within acquaintances/buddies/friends. This is similar to the traditional hierarchies in LDAP servers, who in practice limit us in what is easily done. Even for other services we tend to limit ourselves to this way of thinking, for example are there very few customer relation clouds that let you assign a person to two different organizations. Relations are normally with a person, not with a graph. I need persons assigned to multiple organizations because so many of my customers have more than one job or are in the process of fusion/fission for their organizations.

Child play is what Google+ circles look right now: disjunct circles you can skip around in. There is currently not much more than twitter lists or Facebook lists in the functionality. So why do I bother to spend time thinking about the potential? Because something needs to be done with the user interfaces for sharing information, and the Circles is a new kid on the block.

Some of the functionality I like about circles

Visual guide for who is in what circle

Drag and drop interface, still needs quite some work before escaping beta

Ability to put people in multiple circles

I think Google should not aim for the bull’s eye, but rather aim for something usable in everyday life, something more like child’s play.

Do not disturb my circles

Are we ready to take up the challenge of using flat space for rights management? It depends on the user interface, and the way circles are implemented today are several steps away from what we need

Visualization of circles overlap: Venn diagrams

Ability to weed out persons/circles (everybody but my cousin will get the funny pics, I want to closely follow my close friends but not the chatty girl posting too many updates)

Sorting the list of circles, and adapting the sort to usage patterns

Importing (and searching) from a variety of circles: people who get the same email, lists from other sources, people who live in my area, teams, my co-workers etc

Automatic updates, reflected in the search facilities

Scaling, for those with more than 15 people in their lives

And all of this needs to happen without having to think too hard about how to do the right thing for me as an end user. Otherwise I’ll just not bother. Google has great intelligence for search, they need to apply that same thinking to who-gets-what in the social networks.

Forget bull’s eye, give us child’s play

If a child can play with the circles and get rights management right, then the solution is good enough. Forget about building the perfect hierarchy with the single root, and get the flow going!